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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Stripping plastic models

By TheGraveMind

No, sadly not talking about daemonettes. I've got some old models I tested off brand primers and paint schemes on, and now I want them looking nice. So I need to strip the paint off of them, but these are plastic minis. I've only ever done metal minis, having great success with pinesol. So I decided I'd work on a little experiment.

You do a quick search and almost everyone praises simple green. So I figured I'd grab some and try it out. Well I did a 1:3 mix seeing as I couldn't find any point of reference to try with, and left it over night. Well the paint looks softer, but you really have to scratch at it to get it off, and it only comes down to the primer. I pulled one out and let it soak in pinesol of a few hours, and almost all of the paint came off with a scrub and started to get past the primer.

I'm taking pictures as I go, so tomorrow I'll have a good update on how it went. Once I figure out a method, I'll tweak my experiment and see if I can't get some solid data for future work.

I've been using Castrol Super Clean for a long time now and I love it. Just don't get it on your skin. Or use it in an enclosed room. But it strips metal, plastic, and resin quite easily with no melting. I've left both plastic and resin models in it for several days (weeks with some marines that I forgot about), and they still looked great.